Extracting and Exploiting Inherent Sparsity for Efficient IoT Support in 5G: Challenges and Potential Solutions

摘要

Besides enabling an enhanced mobile broadband, next generation of mobilenetworks (5G) are envisioned for the support of massive connectivity ofheterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT)s. These IoTs are envisioned for a largenumber of use-cases including smart cities, environment monitoring, smartvehicles, etc. Unfortunately, most IoTs have very limited computing and storagecapabilities and need cloud services. Hence, connecting these devices through5G systems requires huge spectrum resources in addition to handling the massiveconnectivity and improved security. This article discusses the challengesfacing the support of IoTs through 5G systems. The focus is devoted todiscussing physical layer limitations in terms of spectrum resources and radioaccess channel connectivity. We show how sparsity can be exploited foraddressing these challenges especially in terms of enabling wideband spectrummanagement and handling the connectivity by exploiting device-to-devicecommunications and edge-cloud. Moreover, we identify major open problems andresearch directions that need to be explored towards enabling the support ofmassive heterogeneous IoTs through 5G systems.